The Happiest Music in the World

We've known for a long time that Kazuo Ishiguro is just the postmodernist to brighten your day! Sometimes, when I'm feeling really sad, I just think about that butler, walking alone down the boardwalk and wondering if he would connect with people if he sometimes made jokes, and I cheer right up! ...Just let me pause a second to wipe my eyes. No, of course I'm not crying about The Remains of the Day. What a ridiculous idea. It's just, uh, just allergies.

Kaz, at least, seems happy enough about it. In fact, he's a pretty happy guy who seems perfectly capable of normal human emotion and interaction. So why does his usual smile seem a bit dimmer, more mysterious, as if he were repressing a forbidden emotion or dark secret the way only a Kazuo Ishiguro character can? It's because he's about to BLOW YOUR MINDS. That's right. Because the seemingly mild-mannered Mr. Ishiguro also wrote the screenplay for The Saddest Music in the World. Yes, the same one directed by that Wizard of Winnipeg, Guy Maddin (who should probably have his own post here, as soon as we convince him to get a Twitter account)*. So next time you think about Kazuo Ishiguro, raise a glass of beer for him. And if that beer is Lady Port-Huntley Beer, all the better. And if you're drinking it out of a glass prosthetic leg, then that's bizarre. But a fitting tribute nonetheless.

*Andreas (aka Pussy Goes Grr) suggests that Winnipeg may not have the Internet, but rather a "steampunkish, 2-strip Technicolor simulacrum thereof." Nonetheless, I think we'll see Guy tweeting someday, and I hope that all of his tweets, when we finally convince him to join, will later be used as titles in a silent film about a mad scientist putting on a musical while coming to terms with his childhood and the death of his own child as well as the harsh land that has been his only home.